I've seen a lot of comments about "The best government is a benevolent
dictator", and comments back/replying to that.
I'd like to take this a bit futher.
The best government is one that accomplishes its goals, with the least
resources used to do so.
A benevolent dictatorship will be the best design for a government, given
that the goal of the government is the goals of that dictator.
The real question, that everyone on this list is dancing around, is:
What are the goals, what is the criteria for determining "This is a
successfully run internet"?
If we, the internet community that cares enough about this to read what
is probably among the top 5 volume lists, can come to a rough concensus
on this question, then determining what sort of governing agency is needed
is trivial.
If we cannot, then no governing agency will be accepted.
Worse, if some agency is appointed, and then issues a statement of "this
is what is wanted" without even trying to get a concensus from those
involved, well, then you get what looks like ARIN to me.
So, the real question is:
What do we want the governing agency for the internet to do?
I'm assuming for the moment that IANA is this agency. And, I'm assuming
that IANA ultimately is responsible for delegating all the IP addresses,
directly or indirectly; and all of the "official" DNS name space, directly
or indirectly. (example: It delegates certain /8's to RIPE; it delegates
.com or .tv to so-and so; if it determines that a delegation is improper,
it can later recall that delegation and re-delegate it to someone else).
If the IANA is going to delegate some /8's to a new registry to replace
the NSF/InterNic, then the question is:
What do we want this new agency to do?
Is it only to manage CIDR blocks in as small a router-polluting
system as possible?
Is it to allow a large number of new regional ISP's to start up with
good connectivity/numbering/accessability to users?
If it is concerned with ISP's, and those ISP's are going after
people who want to get fixed IP's, for more or less dedicated
connections, then the needs of those ISP's will be different
than the needs of ISP's going after short term, single user
systems, and both of those will be different than the needs of
an ISP targeting short to medium term, large block needed LANs
(imagine a LAN of machines, needing to get on the net as a group,
but able to use a variable set of addresses each time. Yes, you
can say "Firewall gateway", but not everyone can dedicate a
full machine to it, and the only product I've seen that does
not require dedicating a machine to this is FireSock for Win95.
And not all machines can even run a firewall product).
If this new agency is going to handle BOTH IP allocations
AND DNS name allocations (Which Are Two Different Things -- they
are only identical in the in-addr.arpa domain), then
A) Why is one agency doing two different things? Why not two
agencies?, and
B) What do we want to have as the goals of this agency for
DNS allocations?
Do we want it to be a self funded, lawsuit surviving capable
agency? If so, that means it has to make a lot of money,
as lawsuits in the US are a big business.
Do we want it to be as unattractive as possible for people
thinking of suing it? If so, we need to make sure it has
as few resources as possible, so that there's no point to suing it.
Do we want it to represent trademarks?
Do we want it to act as a judiciary system for the DNS, or
do we require someone that wants to force a change go through the
courts, with the only possible gain at the end to be the name change,
with a guarantee of no monitary award (as there won't be any
finances or resources to collect)?
Do we even want this new agency to care what the courts tell it to do?
Here I say we don't -- the agency should be completely neutral,
not regard any decision made by the courts as anything other than
a change in what the company's policies are -- in particular, it's
not a black mark, nor does it cary any future problems, for this
company to be told by the courts, "you must change this allocation,
and not do this sort of thing in the future".
Folks, these are, as far as I can tell, the real questions.
Michael